SPECIAL: 4:15PM, Tuesday, October 18th 2005.
Packard 101

Planet Scale Software Updates

Pablo Rodriguez RodriguezMicrosoft Research, UK

About the talk:

Fast and effective distribution of software updates (a.k.a patches) to
millions of Internet users has evolved into a critical task over the
last years. The reasons are at least twofold: (i) the number of users is
large which requires costly server resources; (ii) the time between
malware appearance and patch release is shrinking, posing strong
requirements on timeliness of proactive patching.

In this talk, we try to understand how to best provide fast and
effective planet-scale patch dissemination. To this extend, we use
real-world measurement traces gathered from a major software update
system: Windows Updates.

We present a number of interesting observations regarding how frequently
computers are updated, what set of components are updated the most, what
are typical user profiles, etc. We then consider caching and P2P
delivery strategies to efficiently cope with download requests that
exhibit various complexities due to diversity of user operating systems,
temporal dependencies, and time-zone effects. We finally provide
valuable insight in the design and architecture of a large-scale
software update system.

About the speaker:

Pablo Rodriguez is a researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. Prior
to Microsoft he worked at Bell-Labs and Inktomi. His research interests
are in the areas of P2P (Avalanche), Content Distribution, and Wireless
networks. He holds a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (EPFL).

As a result of his work Pablo Rodriguez received several awards
including the "Prix de la Recherche" in France, and the "Extraordinary
Category Classification in Science" from the USA government.